Devices that can be used to capture (e.g. record) video of an environment are widely known and available. It is also known to adapt or use such video capture devices to augment a user experience of an environment, for example by augmenting a live video-stream of an environment with additional display information.
Known devices or systems that aim to augment a user's experience by displaying video stream of an environment include: Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted display system; smartphone-based Augmented Reality (AR) systems, Hololens®, Oculus Rift®, and the like.
Many of these devices and systems are adapted to be able to share a user's view with a second viewer. A video stream displayed to a user of a VR head-mounted display system may therefore be shared with another person so that the other person can see what the user (i.e. wearer of the VR head-mounted display) is seeing. The sharing of the video may be implemented via an IP-based video call, a dedicated video communication link, or a video broadcast channel, for example. Thus, such use examples may include a user potentially enabling un-trusted third-parties to view the shared video.
In examples of a video being recorded and/or communicated (e.g. transmitted, sent or broadcast), the videoed environment may contain objects, entities, items, etc. displaying protected content (e.g. secret, sensitive or copyright-protected material) that the owner of the protected content does not wish to be recorded and/or communicated (e.g. viewed by un-trusted, unauthorized, or unknown third-parties).
Post-processing a video to blur-out portions of video that a content-creator/owner does not wish a viewer of the video to see is known. However, such post-processing concepts and techniques require the control or input of a content-creator (e.g. editor) after the video has been created. They also typically require labor/input-intensive resources to process the video before it can be communicated for viewing. Thus, existing post-processing techniques incur significant processing resources and time-delays.